DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS
16 January 2025-23:59-GMT+01:00 Central European Time (Rome)
ABOUT WFP
The World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity, for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.
At WFP, people are at the heart of everything we do and the vision of the future WFP workforce is one of diverse, committed, skilled, and high performing teams, selected on merit, operating in a healthy and inclusive work environment, living WFP's values (Integrity, Collaboration, Commitment, Humanity, and Inclusion) and working with partners to save and change the lives of those WFP serves.
To learn more about WFP, visit our website:
WHY JOIN WFP?- WFP is a 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.- WFP offers a highly inclusive, diverse, and multicultural working environment.- WFP invests in the personal & professional development of its employees through a range of training, accreditation, coaching, mentorship, and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities.- A career path in WFP provides an exciting opportunity to work across the various country, regional and global offices around the world, and with passionate colleagues who work tirelessly to ensure that effective humanitarian assistance reaches millions of people across the globe.- We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:
Ensuring a diverse and healthy diet for our growing world population through sustainable food systems is one of the greatest challenges of our times.
This is particularly true in low
- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where undernutrition remains a major problem due to diets that are often not diverse enough, lack adequate protein quality and micronutrients, and may also be insufficient to meet energy needs.
Furthermore, climate change and shocks also affect food systems, affecting diets and requiring diverse adaptations.
Food supply and demand challenges encompass the linkages between health, food, purchasing power, and the environment.
Food and diets have a direct impact on human health and environmental sustainability.
Providing an increasing population with diets that address multiple urgent priorities—nutrition, affordability, adaptation to climate change as well as the need to mitigate agriculture's contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), biodiversity loss, soil erosion, freshwater depletion, zoonosis, antimicrobial resistance, and other areas of public health and ecological concern—will require the development of long-term and context-appropriate strategies for the different components of the entire food system.
It is essential to acknowledge that transitioning to sustainable healthy diets might lead to an increase in GHG emissions in LMICs, making it crucial to balance environmental and nutritional objectives.
The Enhance project envisions the use of analytics to address the challenge of achieving an affordable healthy diet whilst limiting the environmental impacts.
Enhance aspires to be an open-access platform for data-analysts and policymakers that brings together data from different domains to compare dietary scenarios for their different impacts.
Multi-objective linear optimization will allow users to explore synergies and trade-offs between cost, environmental impact, dietary preferences, and nutrient adequacy of dietary scenarios, generating evidence to inform actions and policies for food systems transformation.
The first version of Enhance was piloted in 2023 and a version ready for external users is under development with the objective of being rolled out in 2025.
To support this exciting project, Enhance is looking for a consultant to join the product development team and support the development and integration of the solution's optimization algorithm in collaboration with WFP, ZHL and Capgemini.
The consultant will be expected to be an active member of the development team and attend sprint ceremonies.
Therefore, the consultant should ensure adequate overlap of work hours between Western Europe and their location.
ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Support the development and rollout of the Enhance optimization algorithm, including:- Testing and validating new features to ensure quality, consistency, and the alignment with best practices on agile development;- Developing and maintaining the data pipeline of the platform, and contributing to the development of the data infrastructure to facilitate data input and output processing for Enhance;- Supporting the maintenance of the Enhance Tableau dashboard;- Supporting WFP teams during analyses to ensure the outputs are correct, and to diagnose and resolve issues that may arise;- Improving the user experience and interaction with the algorithm by supp